Well, I was thinking in response to the question that I have never heard of a convincing Protestant private revelation or miracle, but you’ve flat out proven me wrong!
Great story. Thanks Bob!
There’s actually an additional personal revelation to the story. He also said “I think you might have seen this ghost before”.
Now for the life of me I couldn’t think what he was talking about, but after the event his additional comment made sense.
Way back circa 1970 I sometimes used to go camping with my father outside a locality called Legume just over the border in New South Wales. To get there we’d travel via Ipswich, Warwick and Killarney.
These days there’s a bypass and has been for quite some time, so I wouldn’t need to go through Ipswich to make the same trip again from where we lived at that time. But back then we needed to go through the centre of Ipswich, both ways, although we could have gone via Beaudesert and Queen Mary Falls. But that would have taken a lot longer.
After the event happened, I cast my mind back to one particular trip when we were coming home again, and driving down Brisbane Street in Ipswich. It was probably a Sunday or long weekend Monday, or we would not have been camping. As such, the town was pretty deserted as the shops would have been shut, and there was no Sunday trading back then.
I still remember though seeing this bloke standing on the footpath with this resigned, frustrated look on his face, and carrying a brief case. As we went past I looked at him, and he looked me. I kept watching him for some reason, and he turned and walked into one of the shops. Trouble was the door was closed at the time.
It gave me the heebie geebies, and I did my best to forget it, thinking I must have had some sort of nervous twitch.
But years later the story made sense, in light of his prediction.
Now I’d never spoken to him about that episode, but somehow he just knew, and said so.
He predicted his own eldest son’s “health breakdown” (had a stroke about five years later); my sister’s death (“I don’t think your sister will live very long” - she died of leukemia in 2005 aged 45); the Port Arthur gun massacre (1996 I think “I think there’ll be a massacre at Port Arthur. They’ll use that to bring in gun control”); that I’d become Catholic , a black US president; the Second Gulf War (“I think there’ll be a second Gulf War. The Americans will have had enough of Saddam Hussein and they’ll get rid of him. But I think they’ll lose a
few men the next time!”, and it was pretty obvious the way he said “few” he meant more than a “few” - nearly 5000 as it turned out compared to about 120 for total coalition casualties for the first Gulf War).
He was accurate, and the only reason he could be so accurate was that God was telling him.
He even said to me once, in relation to a warning he gave to a young bloke in his congregation, that “I seem to find that if I say something, it happens”. The context in this case was that he’d warned the young bloke about his dangerous motor bike riding. He said it was obvious to everybody, but he felt a bit guilty as he wished he’d warned him a little differently.
What he said was “If you don’t smarten up and start riding your machine more carefully, you won’t last two weeks!” Obviously he didn’t mean it literally, but he said he buried him precisely two weeks later.
It was a good idea to listen to him.
As I said, Protestants can get private revelations. On the other hand, they need to be discerned, because there’s a lot of rubbish out there as well.
